Fresh Onions has its fair share of onion links, and like Harry71’s former site, it’s updated frequently. I was going to take a screenshot of the whole site, but on the device I’m currently using, that function was disabled.

Basically, the list of onions can be sorted by URL, Title, how recently it was added, when it was last visited, or when it was last up (i.e. active). At the time of this writing, it lists 4470 onions, and growing.

So you may be wondering – what kinds of sites are on it?? Well, at first glance, I see a lot of tech sites, some markets, a few forums, and some scam sites. Just what I expected!

While I have yet to create my own onion crawler, here’s a short sampling of some of the sites that are listed on Fresh Onions (note – I make no claim as to the authenticity of any of these; if it sounds like a scam, it probably is.):

The answer, of course, is yes! What I don’t know for certain is how good the various iOS apps are, but I can at least share some of the available offerings.

The three most popular apps available from the iTunes Store (at the moment) are called Onion Browser (by Mike Tigas), Red Onion (by Omar Mody), and VPN Browser, (by Art Fusion).

That’s Just, Like…Your Opinion, Man

So, all three of these Tor-powered apps have high ratings on the iTunes Store itself, but those can be misleading – after all, the developers could’ve written them, right?

Since I don’t have a lot of personal experience using these apps, I turned to the community to see what they thought. The site iPhone.informer features reviews of all kinds of different apps.

Even on there, Red Onion seems to have overwhelmingly positive reviews. Onion Browser, on the other hand, received mixed reviews. (Many users complained that it crashes frequently, which is also a problem with the desktop version).

As for the VPN Browser, it also has mainly positive reviews, with the exception of one, who said, “Every time I try to watch a video the app crashes.” I almost never watch videos on Tor anyway, so that doesn’t concern me!

Internet Is Leaking!

What I’ve heard through the grapevine, on articles like The problem behind mobile Tor browsers’ IP disclosure, is that all three of these apps do work well in terms of being user-friendly, but on the downside, I’ve also heard that they have a serious problem with IP leakage (which would defeat the purpose of using them!).

On the plus side, the developers have apparently fixed these errors in more recent versions of Onion Browser and Red Onion.

Screenshot: courtesy of xordern.net

Actually, an update to the above post says that the HTML5 multimedia leak and download-related leaks were fixed in later versions – hopefully that’s no longer a problem.

The current version of Tor (or the desktop version, at least) now warns you if a URL attempts to do this (Tor users are probably familiar with this message):

Even if the leak problem is “fixed,” I would still be cautious about using some of these mobile apps to access the Tor network. There are other methods that can be used to deanonymize users, and the very act of using Tor raises suspicion…

Aww, but I was just looking at pictures of cute cats!! Anyhow, it seems that at the moment, no version of Tor is 100% anonymous, but if you’re careful enough, it may not matter.

Just don’t ask about buying any nuclear missiles, OK? (I’m serious about that.)